2017 is almost over BUT that doesn't mean your chance to improve your business is. End the year with meaningful progress on stuff that matters. Below I've curated the best step-by-step guides written by real bootstrappers you can trust.

The NOAA Barrow Baseline Atmospheric Observatory, with the Arctic Ocean in the background. (Mike Worley/Bureau of Land Management)

Last week, scientists were pulling together the latest data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s monthly report on the climate when they noticed something strange: One of their key climate monitoring stations had fallen off the map.

In a major step toward making a quantum computer using everyday materials, a team led by researchers at Princeton University has constructed a key piece of silicon hardware capable of controlling quantum behavior between two electrons with extremely high precision.

Acquiring your first 100k active users is an art, but a messy one—especially if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on marketing and paid acquisition. Winnie crossed this important milestone earlier this year, so I wanted to share some insights about how we did it, with a special focus on strategies that work for almost any product and cost no (or very little) money.

In a spotlight paper from the 2017 NIPS Conference, my team and I presented an AI optimization framework we call Net-Trim, which is a layer-wise convex scheme to prune a pre-trained deep neural network.